That’s one of my favorite things about MST3K: when you see a riff coming from a mile away and you hope they go through with it, and they do.
As soon as the word “OMAR” appeared onscreen, I thought, “You gotta do a reference to The Wire. You HAVE to reference The Wire.” And sure enough, they did, and that was awesome!
Also, welcome to the forums!
Yes, welcome to the forums indeed, but may I see your Space Status Card?
Thank you both, but if you’ll excuse me, I have to go file my report.
(Coach’ll totally ream me if I don’t file my report.)
I really enjoyed it and thought it was funny. Audio seemed better than Santo although could still be better. I really LOVE Pearl being the mad to introduce the shorts and the fact that there is wrap around content for the short.
What I didn’t like:
the length of the short was 10 mins… it’s a 24 min film. I generally don’t have a problem with cutting out really dull sections of movies/shorts if it improves the whole experience… but cutting 14 mins is overkill for this.
Contrast this with the other thing I didn’t like about the event… Jonah’s new host segments during manos were often too long and not nearly as engaging as the riffing in the short.
If they cut it down to 10 mins in order to keep the livestream under 3 hours then I would suggest they should rebalance the lengths of the additional content… Shorten Jonah’s host segments and expand the length of the shorts. You can still end at 3 hours and it would improve the quality of the entire livestream IMO.
The other issue I had is the riffing performance during the short felt rougher than usual. Baron flubbed a few lines completely and his impression of the Count was a bit grating… Generally I love Baron as servo so it stood out to me. Seemed like they rushed recording the riff for that short and didn’t do any ‘patching’ of flubbed lines like they did on the old episodes.
The ‘one take’ feel was also an issue during the Mads segments in Santo and a bit in the pearl/cynthia skits in the manos event. Doing more takes would improve things a lot IMO.
Final Thought: Hampton is just the best… he had me cracking up in this short. It was a great night.
I wish the table wasn’t just a common ‘table’… but it adds depth to the image.
The purple tint in the lighting and upping the contrast to make the colors on the console pop and the moon look more ominous were good improvements too.
Amazing what small small tweaks can do.
Call me crazy… but I don’t want the live events to be much more than the 3 hours this one was. 3 hours is plenty.
but even on an individual riff basis I support editing it down…
Here is Rifftrax’s official answer to ‘Why do you edit the movies?’
"Short answer: To make them funny!
Longer answer: Tooooo maaaaaake theeeemmmmmm funnnnyyyyyyyy.
In all seriousness, the movies we riff on are bad. Very bad. And usually, they’re bad for several reasons, including such boring filmmaking details as pacing, editing, and overall coherence.
Just like back in the Mystery Science Theater days, we sometimes edit our Video On Demand titles for comedic value . That’s to help you, the viewer, as well as to make the end result more entertaining — or, at least, watchable .
Likewise, if a movie includes scenes of extreme violence, sexual assault, gratuitous nudity, or something else that we think would otherwise detract from folks’ being able to actually enjoy the riffing, we will make edits where appropriate.
But we always try to take care to leave whatever plot there is intact, and to make sure that the RiffTrax content you experience is funny first."
I agree with them. Cull the dull.
That being said the pipeline riff should have been longer than it was.
As a native New Orleanian I also squeed at that reference!
As far as technical feedback: The only bothersome thing for me was the volume of the riffers (mainly crow) was too much louder than the narration on the video. Otherwise, it worked great.
I have a soft spot for these types of old “educational” shorts!
The riffing was on point, and it’s pretty crazy how topical this subject is today!
I’d love to see more of these shorts, they are great when my attention span is not functioning 
I’m sure this will get “fixed in post”, but audio levels could use some attention
Having watched it again the other day. I am in total agreement that the “It’s morning on Lake Erie, and Omar comin’.” riff is so good. It’s Crow’s folksy tone of voice that makes it work.
I’m always struck (pleasantly) by the relentless optimism of those mid-century documentaries. Compare to present-day documentaries. I like to watch nature docs but there’s always that last five minutes where the narrator’s voice goes down an octave and we get to hear about how humans are ruining everything.
It may be true, but I wanna go back to hearing about how great life is on this side of the Iron Curtain!
Ironically, it’s much less true now than it was then.
Edit: lol, I boy did I quote the wrong thing. What the hell does that even mean? I meant this part is much less true today:
That’s partly because of the documentaries.
Well, yes, but to be more specific . . .
I think it’s due to the wealth. A poor man looks at an old redwood and a spotted owl and sees lunch. As we’ve gotten richer we’ve been able to look around and decide we don’t like living in a sty.
But that wealth drives increased demand for resources.
On the other hand, most people in the world earn less than an eighth of the median US income (poverty is typically defined as being below half the median), so there are still quite a lot of poor people out there.
The collection and use of resources is not inherently (net) damaging to the environment, when people are wealthy enough to care.
There will always be poor people, because “poor” is defined relative to others. Same reason there will always be dumb people. People have gotten much, much richer over just the past 100 years.
Not inherently, no…
However you can do something about how many poor people there are relative to others. Wealth doesn’t follow a normal distribution, and doesn’t even have a well-defined mean value (it follows a Pareto distribution); which is why the median is used to define “average”. Half the people earn less than half the median, by definition: but how low in absolute terms are you prepared to allow that median to go?
Overall. The distribution, however, hasn’t seen anywhere near such a dramatic improvement. There might be more wealth, but it’s more tightly concentrated both at personal and national levels.
In fact, while extreme poverty has been declining in relative terms since early last century, and in absolute terms since the 1990s (because of an exploding population), the last couple of years have seen a backsliding, indicating how fragile “not being in extreme poverty” can be.
Previous experiments on that front have not only been wildly unsuccessful, they’ve always resulted in even worse dichotomies. In honor of tax day in America, I always give a hearty, ironic chuckle in the direction of the tax code, originally a simple thing targeted at the wealthiest Americans and now a million-to-40-million word monstrosity which somehow, I am assured, allows the wealthiest to escape without paying their “fair share”, worse inequality than ever, and a doomed planet because it doesn’t punish people enough for doing the wrong things.
But there are far more grievous historical examples, of course, because every example starts with “if only we had the power to force people to do what we told them”. And this never ends well.
Experiments in the opposite direction have worked out worse as well. Wealth tends to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy (income is proportional to existing wealth), and relaxing income tax requirements ends up enhancing inequality as that concentration becomes more severe. One thing income tax does do is skim
It’s like water in reverse. Wealth is drawn in from the outside world through labour and capital investment, flows through the population from the poorer parts towards the wealthier parts (though capital investment skips the lower slopes: the wealthier you are the more opportunities you have to increase your wealth) and ends up in the peaks of the wealthy elite. Then tax comes along and draws up that higher-level wealth and filters it back further down the slope in the form of public services and maintenance (government workers deserve a paycheck, too) to resume its part of the cycle.
Well, there are those that start with “How can we engineer an economy so that doing the right thing is rewarding for those who do it?”